Charles Krauthammer said
Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier”that President Obama’s attempt to
lay out his foreign policy vision during his commencement address at West Point
was “literally pointless. It didn't have a point, it was a defensive speech.”
One day after he declared
that all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan by 2016, Obama told the
graduating cadets that "the landscape has changed" with the end of
the war in Iraq. The president said that Wednesday’s graduating class would be the
first class in nearly a decade that likely will not be deployed to a war zone.
“(While) I was worried
about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to
avoid looking weak," he said, "just because we have the best hammer
does not mean that every problem is a nail."
Krauthammer, a syndicated
columnist and Fox News contributor, said the president’s speech was misguided.
“It was an answer to the
chorus of criticism, even from his side of the aisle, that it's been a weak,
leaderless, rudderless foreign policy, which it has been," he said.
"I spoke to a member of Congress who was in the armed forces and he said
there was a real pettiness and a personalization of this."
“This is a graduation
speech for West Point," he said. "It was not a place where you -- you
know, you want to be inspiring the future officers of America, it isn't a place
to answer your critics or to go point by point against all the attacks on him.
And he set out this ridiculous contrast between extreme isolationism on the one
hand, and extreme, almost a caricature of intervention, on the other hand.”
In his speech, Obama also
said there are those “interventionists from the left and right” who argue that
“America's failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations…
invites escalating aggression in the future.”
Obama said he believed
there was no military solution to the ongoing civil war in Syria, but he vowed
that the United States would continue to support the Syrian people.
Krauthammer said that
characterization missed the mark.
“There's not a person in America who's asking
for boots on the ground in Syria or in Ukraine. In those places, people said
show some rhetorical support, show some serious economic sanctions on Ukraine,
give these people, all they're asking for is the weapons to defend themselves,
which Obama has denied them, and in Syria it's led to 160,000 dead," he
said. "So, I mean, he sets up straw man, he makes the argument and I think
it was a very weak and defensive speech.”
